I agree. We may not like it but subscriptions are not going away.
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I use Syncthing a bit (nowhere near as much recently) and it is open source and has had issues with this. One developer took the core project and made it available on iOS via a wrapper (with some limitations). However, it was charging $1.99 for a premium version with fewer limitations that rankled some people within the community. It seemed reasonable for me simply because they need to at least recover the Apple dev fee or they end up paying for it.
This is somewhat good news. I always struggle to decide which one out of Notability and Good Notes is a better fit for me.
Now I do not have toā¦
Until Good Notes goes subscription. 
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You just cant see me happy, can you lol 
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That made me laugh! 
Didnāt mean to be a āDebby Downer.ā
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So basically youāre supporting devs doing anything they like. We canāt complain even if theyāre taking away features we paid for. Okay.
If Apple turns your volume button into a subscription, would you just say the market has changed, donāt complain, letās just settle with ādonāt pay it if you donāt think itās worthā?
If they release a new app and stop updating the old one, thatās totally fine.
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This twitter thread by Halide developer provides interesting perspective:
As a consumer I much rather prefer developers adopt the Halide way or the agenda way. I am not opposed to subscriptions. It just does not sit well with me when features I paid for are now behind a subscription.
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Kaleidoscope is, as you say, going the paid upgrade route rather than subscription. You, and I assume others, are unhappy with the cost of the upgrade. The new owners explain that the code really has not been touched since 2013. If you amortize the cost of the upgrade over the 8 years, it is ~ $10.00 a year.
I would consider $10.00 to be a fair price for a subscription for this app if it is being responsibly maintained and advanced.
The general problem with software is that it is not āstableā. It rots over time. There are changes in operating systems and UIās and expectations that make perfectly acceptable code start to stutter. It is akin to buying a boat, you have to accept that there are maintenance costs.
There are many options for the developer and none of them are going to make all customers happy. As a consumer, I prefer the subscription model because it gives me a sense of what the ārealā costs of owning this āboatā is going to be. But I still can be misled. If may be that the subscription income is insufficient and the software will die. It may be that the developer just intends to live off of the subscriptions as long as possible without touching the code and wait until finally the customers realize they have been had. The product with upgrades has the advantage that I always own what I have already paid for. If I am content to live with existing bugs and run old hardware and operating systems, I could expect to run the product for an indefinite time. With the subscription model, it might be that if I stop paying then I stop being able to use the product that day.
Personally the worst outcome is for a product that I rely on (or which I have invested a lot of time to learn) dies. The pricing model may have seemed great: pay only once. The ultimate outcome is bad. With decades of experience, I am very cautious about this model.
With the subscription model, I at least know that the developer has some incentive to keep me happy. Many, many problems persist beyond what I have mentioned above.
- Ever increasing costs. You thought that the subscription for an app that you depend on is going to be X and now it is 2X. I am sophisticated enough to understand inflation but beyond this I need the developer to be really communicative about why this has occurred.
- The annoying notification that āyour subscription has been renewed for the yearā rather than a notification a month earlier that āyour subscription will be renewed for the year.ā giving you time to reconsider the situation. One reason that I like the App Store is subscriptions are handled in a uniform fashion making it easier to handle a multitude of subscriptions.
- The little tricks that make canceling subscriptions difficult: UIās with small buttons etc.
- I like the SetApp model in that a bunch of individual subscription are reduced to one. Also there exist apps that I might need once a year. There are not complex. They are just little tools. The SetApp model makes it possible for me to engage with such apps in a reasonable way.
In the future we may see more āonlineā apps. With Adobe etc., you can already ārentā apps for short periods of time. But predominantly these are basically going to be subscription models as best I can see.
As for Kaleidoscope, as a user I am annoyed to learn that Black Pixel never did much of anything with the product after the initial purchase and PR flurry. I used the product and liked it but it never got ābetterā. Over that time period from 2013, BBEdit has introduced file comparison tools that have, for my use case, grown to be better than what was in Kaleidoscope although the latter was a dedicated product. So now I use BBEdit which overall is a fantastic piece of software (upgrade model). I spend a LOT of time reconciling two slightly different text files. I cannot use the new Kaleidoscope because I have old hardware that does not run the newest OS and thus not the newest Kaleidoscope.
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Iāve never been a heavy user of Kaleidoscope. My version 2 license still seems to work, for the time being at least. I also own BBEdit so Iāve got file diffs covered. Iāve never noticed whether BBEdit can diff folders, which does come in handy sometimes. Iām pretty sure BBEdit cannot diff images, which was never a particularly useful feature for me.
I ponied up for the new version of Kaleidoscope. Iām hoping itās a down payment on future improvements to the app (fingers crossed on an updated iPad version as well).
I am more likely to give GoodNotes my subscription money just because their art and templates are more open. Etsy has lots of .goodnotes sheets of fantastic art and templates. Lots of free stuff gets donated in /r/goodnotes also.
Before I went to GoodNotes I had spent $25 for Notabilityās add-on in-app purchases. Where did that bring me? Back to Thanosā¦
reddit seems to be reaching a boil over the functionality removal also.
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There is software that I have that I still use on my old iPad mini. Perhaps I bought them 12 years ago, something like that. Still works. No one is trying to take it away. When they do that, they want you to buy into their system and fleece you at the point that it is expedient.
Ok. Maybe not forever but at least you donāt have to worry about safeguarding your info perhaps, right? Like my stuff is stuck in Day One. I am not sure how to get it out. I donāt have the patience to cut and paste. The alternative is getting it out in ONE document. Cāmon. They donāt care about their customers to pull some of the stuff they have. That I doubt is the developers. That is big business and they are into bucks.
Certainly not all developers because as a group I think they are quite cool. I am not sure but it seems that the large companies are the biggest offenders. Iām not talking about the two man outfit.
Then you have the apps that are ripping off kids. There is a lot of that going around. That is big business again. That doesnāt have much to do with subscriptions but there are companies just setting up for the windfall.
I hear you. Hope is a wonderful thing. May all your software wishes come true! 
Now why didnāt I think of that? Apple has a wealth of fine apps most of which I love. And, you are so right. This is the clincher. You probably are not going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to get your stuff out! But can I help it if I love apps?
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Just pure greed. Dumping this app & keeping Goodnotes.
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Youād never know the price was that reasonable given the amount of anguish filling this threadā¦
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ROFL. Sometimes itās the principle of the thing. I donāt think it is worth $15. I, for one, already paid. Charge what you wish to new customers.
GoodNotes is considerably better.
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When did theft become reasonable when you only steal a small amount? Maybe $15 is nothing to you but could be a lot to people not so lucky. Itās also a significant increase from the one-off pricing before.